I was able to get my hands on a new Samsung SUR40 Microsoft Surface device. I'm currently in making a proof of concept
My sticking point is the ability to pair my iPhone with the surface. What I want to be able to do is place the iPhone on the screen and have the surface recognize the device. What I was thinking was using an identity tag produced from an iPhone app and placing the iPhone face down. But due to the infrared camera ability of the surface it sees nothing on the phone. I have seen it done before (Amnesia Razorfish). Just wanting to know if anyone has any ideas on how this can be done?
Maybe using a combination of WiFi scanning also might work. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I want to keep it simple as the user just having our app running on the phone than just slapping it on the surface, don't want to over complicate the pairing.
I've explained one way to do this with bluetooth here: Identifying mobile devices paired via bluetooth with PixelSense
A lot is going to depend on whether you own the devices and the network. If you can control the devices, then you can just put a surface tag on each one and put the tag value into the phone's app. Having all devices connected to the same subnet can help with communication, but if you need to handle just any random phone running your app, it gets more complicated.
As to how Razorfish does it, I don't know for sure, but they don't use the bluetooth method I described. I think they use something similar to the Bump app, in which devices running your app would register with a service and keep track of accelerometer data. When Surface detects a phone (either by tag or just by shape), it could 'ask' every connected client if it was the one that was just put down. They may also use the proximity sensor to help.